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Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church |
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Bobbye C. Winston |
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| Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church was active when
Pleasant Ridge was first settled. It was out of existence by
1870. William Walter Maughan moved his letter to Unity Baptist
Church in Pickens Co. AL on Nov. 9, 1870 and the Unity minutes shows
Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church as closed at that time. The deed for the Pleasant Ridge Presbyterian Church describes that church's location as on the Mouth of Sipsey Road and next to the Baptist church. The 1856 Snedicor Map of Pleasant Ridge shows the Baptist Church approximately where the cemetery is now. The 1920 USDA Soil Survey map of Greene County shows TWO churches at the location of the present ... Mr. Richard Owens remembers that in the late 1920s a church building, smaller than the present Presbyterian church, had been moved into the pasture south of the cemetery and was used for hay and equipment storage. Of course, Snedicor's 1856 directory describes the "Pleasant Ridge Missionary Baptist Church" and gives the number of members.
The above photo shows where the Pleasant Ridge Missionary Baptist
church would have stood.
For those not familiar with west Alabama geography, the
Mouth of Sipsey is where the Sipsey River (present boundary
of Greene and Pickens counties) flows into the Upper
Tombigbee River. In the nineteenth century, during winter
and spring the Tombigbee was navigible for steamboats up to
Cotton Gin Port, above Columbus in Mississippi. Now the Tenn-Tom
Waterway makes this open to barge traffic from the Tennessee
River year-round.
I suppose this is what the troopers of the Sixth
Kentucky Cavalry (US) would have seen on the morning of
April 6, 1865. At the time, this road would have led all
the way (through what is now pastures, cropland, and
pine tree farms) all the way to Mouth of Sipsey, where
there were cotton warehouses, a substantial landing
where cotton from Pleasant Ridge was shipped out, and
two ferrys, connecting the landing with Vienna in
Pickens County and Warsaw in Sumter County.
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